Hi Swifties!
Recently, there has been growing interest in a centralized Fundraising Organization to support projects that benefit the Swift Ecosystem, and I am thrilled to announce the launch of the Swift Fundraising Cooperative (SFC), an organization explicitly dedicated to securing commitments from Ecosystem Stakeholders, and allocating it towards work on areas of the Swift Ecosystem not adequately supported by existing sponsors today.
Why a Fundraising Cooperative?
In the nine years since the launch of the Swift Project, the language has grown significantly beyond Apple and its platforms, and there are many components and technologies people rely on today that cater to unique use cases and suffer from a lack of Serious Financial Investment. Such components might include:
- Features with niche constituencies, but donât fit into a âBig Visionâ currently being spearheaded by the Core Team.
- Middle Ring Infrastructure that is not Universally Foundational but also not specific enough to a single companyâs business for them to justify developing internally from scratch.
- Written Documentation that synthesizes technologies that cut across the individual Areas of Responsibility of existing teams of paid contributors.
Today, there is broad recognition that the existing unpaid, volunteer-driven contribution model for this infrastructure is woefully insufficient to meet the needs of the Swift Community.
- Volunteers without financial support frequently release a version 1.0 of a library, and then abandon the project for lack of funding.
- High quality third-party-backed libraries are often tailored specifically to that companyâs needs, which makes them less useful to others.
- Self-managed fundraising, e.g. through GitHub Sponsors, is exceptionally challenging as an individual, and requires a lot of planning, coordination, follow-up, and marketing diligence that subtracts from time that can actually be spent on development.
- Unpaid volunteers are highly vulnerable to Social Manipulation, or even Outright Bribery, which weakens the security of the Swift Ecosystem.
What do we Hope to Achieve?
Prior to the launch of the SFC, we identified a handful of concrete axes, which we think pose excellent opportunities for investment.
- Platform support. We believe that platforms â such as Android, WebAssembly, Windows, or even âServerâ â constitute a natural stakeholder boundary, which defines a set of potential Sponsors who would benefit from a particular investment.
- Industries. We believe that certain technological stacks â such as 3D Animation, Game Development, or Algorithmic Trading â form natural constituencies that would benefit from coordinated investment.
- Training. We believe that the lack of decent-quality cross-domain Documentation is severely hindering the adoption of Swift within large organizations, and that coordinated investment would enable the creation of training materials that synthesize topics that canât be covered by existing paid teams who can only document the single technology they are working on.
The overarching goal of the SFC is to establish a stable and long-lived counterparty for potential Sponsors to engage with, regardless of their particular areas of interest, and to work with them to allocate resources to the solutions they need. Put another way, when no existing organizations are paying attention to a Problem You Have, us folks at the Swift Fundraising Cooperative are the People To Call.
What Benefits Do Sponsors Receive?
Our ultimate goal is to upstream all of our work to Open Source Swift, for the benefit of the entire community. That said, we understand that Open Source development has historically suffered from the widespread Free-rider Problem, and therefore we expect that certain contributions, particularly platform-specific investments, will be made available under a delayed-licensing model in order to incentivize First Mover investments. However, it is our utmost hope that potential Sponsors will be willing to share the work they have funded immediately to the Community, without delay.
Who is Part of the SFC?
The SFC will have three Founding Members, who will serve as Fundraising Chairs.
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Diana Ma (@taylorswift) is a longtime Swift contributor, who has written over a dozen popular open source Swift libraries, is a member of the Swift Server Working Group (SSWG) and Swift Documentation Working Group (SDWG), and is the creator of the swiftinit.org documentation index.
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Finagolfin (@Finagolfin) has been working on the port of Swift to Android for the last six years, producing the Android SDK bundle. He is a member of the Swift on Android community workgroup and contributed to a handful of open-source projects over the last couple decades, ever since he first installed linux on his desktop a quarter-century ago, while fitting in working for a couple tech startups too.
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Tyler Furby (@furby-tm) is a computer graphics developer, with experience working on projects like Epic Gameâs Unreal Engine, Blender, and Pixarâs OpenUSD. Currently focusing on bringing Swift into the film and video game industry, Tyler is a member of the Academy Software Foundationâs (ASWF) Language Interop Project and the founder of the nonprofit organization, Wabi Foundation.
Fundraising Chairs are responsible for discussing needs with potential Sponsors, matching them with Implementers, and helping manage the work being funded in order to provide some measure of confidence in Open Source Swift investments.
Fundraising Chairs will additionally function as Reliable Intermediaries, who will respond to messages in a timely fashion and forward it to a desired recipient, if possible. We encourage everyone to participate in the all-important goal of funding investments in the Swift Ecosystem, regardless of membership.
How Can I Get Involved?
We want everyone to get involved with the SFC, even if you are unable to make a direct financial commitment of your own. Do you know somebody who may be able to fund work of interest to you? Do you yourself have expertise that might make you an attractive recipient for a grant? Or do you even just want to talk about the future direction of the Swift Ecosystem? Please donât hesitate to reach out! The mission of the SFC is to function as an active, responsive counterparty to field these types of queries.